Scummvm SVN from june + Future wars

StarG · Post by **StarG** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 12:34 am

Firstover, FW seems to run nicely overall. The joystick steering makes it more difficult but thats as always.

I really enjoyed it having finally a working save menu. Cheers

That means: further testing could be made.

What did i notice:

* The game was dreaded for its pixel-hunting features... no wonder someone invented the screen magnifier. As a general ciné request (nothing specific for the port) i would welcome for the magnification not to affect the whole screen but to have a movable block in which the zoomed area resides. The actual zoom is unusuable as messages could not be seen and its even harder to control

* timed sequences: ah well.. the game had pressured sequences which are mediocre to hard on a pc equipped with a mouse. Now consider the unwieldy and slow joystick steering here. Result: i cannot pass even the first station (back-office: the small room where you have to enter a code in a keypad while the ceiling slowly descents to crush out poor hero)

As a solution i would propose to decrease the timing factor _vm->_global->_speedFactor temporarily to offset the control difficulties - maybe a sytem message "bullet time active" or sort of would be nice

(i can supply a savegame just before this sequence if necessary)

* audio samples: the old sfx bug seems still present. When some audio playing is triggered (like the dropped water can in the first scene) its constantly playing afterwards. Actually its volume should fade slowly and eventually stop, which does not happen. (no save game necessary: just start the game)

* could the ciné engine be patched (again: non-gp2x-port specific) so that actions to be carried out from a distance do not trigger that dreaded "come a little closer" statement?

Thanks for listening

DJWillis · Post by **DJWillis** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 8:49 am

StarG,

Thanks for the detailed report. Glad to know the game 'sort of works'.

As for the pixel hunting, not sure what can be done there, I have pondered a 'mini zoom' window in the top right that cycles round with the current zoom, i.e. you could have normal screen/quarter zoom/mini zoom/normal screen etc.

Not sure how to implement that in a nice manor however and I guess the mini zoom would need to be movable so as not to get in the way of the game screen…

As for ‘bullet time’, I am not quite sure how I could trap the status of the game with enough detail to make the 'bullet time' automatic but maybe it could be turned on and off with a button combo. I will have to ponder that.

I think it would also help with Whack-A-Rat and a few other 'hard to do' bits of games, all in all, not a bad idea at all but I do wonder if it would play havoc with the game scripts

. Oh well, I guess trying and seeing would resolve that concern quickly.

John

fingolfin · Post by **fingolfin** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:14 am

DJWillis wrote: Not sure how to implement that in a nice manor however ...

Well, simple enough. Just find a rich sponsor who donates some money to pay for the manor and then go ahead and work there

DJWillis · Post by **DJWillis** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:19 am

fingolfin wrote:
DJWillis wrote: Not sure how to implement that in a nice manor however ...
Well, simple enough. Just find a rich sponsor who donates some money to pay for the manor and then go ahead and work there

There we go again, I just walk right into these things

.

StarG · Post by **StarG** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:24 am

StarG · Post by **StarG** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:36 am

DJWillis wrote:StarG,

As for the pixel hunting, not sure what can be done there, I have pondered a 'mini zoom' window in the top right that cycles round with the current zoom, i.e. you could have normal screen/quarter zoom/mini zoom/normal screen etc.

John

thats what i thought too

- a static one lurking in the top right corner should do for the moment beeing (remember its not port specific and [s|c]ould be added into trunk (with basic guidance i would do it myselves))

DJWillis wrote:As for ‘bullet time’, I am not quite sure how I could trap the status of the game with enough detail to make the 'bullet time' automatic

I think it should be automatic... we're going to ease the game if not. I would propose a table when to activate and to deactivate the state. The tricky part would be to have a engine debugger which dumps key points. For the first hazard: its when you enter a special room: so leaving and joining rooms is some event which should be the monitored by the "game-fairness-on-tricky-consoles arbiter"

i'm not actually sure how to do the thing... maybe it could be constantly polling some game states. Or maybe the engine could just some #ifdef'ed call to a custom routine who does the checks. I'm not yet sure about. (this would impose a minor performance hit too)

I think i could patch the engine enough to dump such outputs, so i could supply you with the needed information. Agreed?